Describing a beautiful nightmare about the Soviet 1930s

Finally, the dream-like modernist novel "Happy Moscow" from one of the greatest Soviet writers is available again in English and the translation, by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others, has been immediately longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2013.

Moscow
Chestnova, an orphaned girl, born a few years before the Russian revolution, is
named after the city she lives in. Her story strangely mirrors the triumphs and
terrors of the new communism.

A powerfully alive and beautiful young woman, she
marries too young so that “her heart, which had sought heroism, began to love
just one sly man…” Leaving him, she tells a stranger that she loves “the wind
in the air” and he advises her to enroll in the school of aeronautics; she
learns to fly, but plummets to earth after accidentally setting fire to her
parachute. Following her “wandering” instincts, she moves through a series of
lovers, loses a leg while helping to build the Moscow metro, and finally disappears
from her own tale.

In
parallel, author Andrei Platonov introduces the men who love Moscow:
geometrician and town planner, Victor Bozhko, tirelessly writing letters in
Esperanto to fellow-communists around the world, who celebrates Moscow as a
model of a new humanity; or Sambikin, the immortality-seeking surgeon, who
believes that the soul is located in the gut, in the “empty section between the
food and the excrement.”

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Part
of Platonov’s power as a writer lies in his combination of contrasting registers,
the metaphysical and the scatological, scientific and romantic. The mechanical
engineer, Semyon Sartorius, loves the young Moscow so profoundly that “he could
have looked at waste products from her with extreme curiosity.” Philosophical
meditations on the “mystery of existence” segue into trade union committees or
construction-workers’ canteens. The overall effect is more like a dream than a
novel; plot and character are secondary to the hallucinatory progress of vivid,
revelatory scenes.

The
chapter in which Sartorius follows Moscow into the countryside is poetic: the
city’s electrical glow “reached as far as the fields and lay on the ears of rye
like an early, faithless dawn”; the couple walk towards a farm, imagining the
smell of bread and pastured cows; they talk, weep and make love in a pit full
of weeds. Then she leaves him and they return to “daily long labor.” The
following chapter follows Sartorius into his workplace, the “Republic trust for
Scales, Weights and Measures of Length.” Platonov drew on his own experience to
describe this work, according to translator, Robert Chandler, “with almost
documentary accuracy.”

The
juxtaposition of dialogue and emotion with the language of Soviet bureaucracy
creates a powerful impression of the period, and of the difficulties of living
in a system with crushingly super-human ambitions. Moscow’s injuries while
working on the palatial new metro system are symbolic of the individual cost of
what Chandler calls Stalin’s “grand experiments on humanity and the material
world.”

There
is a strong sense in the earlier part of the novel that Platonov wants to
believe in the Soviet ideal. The energy with which his doctors and aeronauts
pursue their utopian goals is matched only by the desolate depictions of
cityscapes, like the Krestov market towards the end of the book, “full of
trading beggars and secret bourgeois.” The bazaar is a starving mayhem of
pitifully recycled remnants of the past, desperate thieves and dead men’s
clothes: a bread seller attacks “a weak man wearing a soldier’s greatcoat from
the old days,” driving him into a pool of urine and lashing him across the face
with a rag.

Chandler
and his team have produced a typically authoritative book, including – along
with the revised translation – a play, an essay and short stories, illuminating
the same characters and themes. The detailed notes quote Platonov’s 1936
jottings about the novel, in which he wrote “the plot mustn’t be over at the
end”. Platonov never officially finished “Happy Moscow”, but the brilliantly
disturbing scenes he has left are complete in their
incompletion. This novel that he worked on for years, not published until 1991,
shows the skill and originality of one of the greatest Soviet writers.